Hi do you have "Water banana " Typhoodorum lindleyanum? particularly interested in the variagated form have many tropical lily,lotus many aquarium types as well as marsh . Most are tropical though gary

sent you a email Mistee

Ambitious indeed. You will have an interesting jungle when the squash start growing :-) I have grown under lights before, but never had much success until this year. I have created a couple of YouTube videos chronicling my work. Have a look if you have a mind to... Here is a link that might be useful: Garth's YouTube channel

Tr, your question is right in my wheelhouse. So, on land I own which happens to be 60 miles north of my driveway apron, we've been afforesting what had been a farm field. Initially, I started with smaller numbers, perhaps 250 seedlings in a given spring. These I tried to do a Cadillac job with, watering, weed control, heck we even mulched the first bunch with wood chips! Fast-forward to 3 springs ago: We then finished up the job via planting 6000 seedlings with a machine planter. Well, prior to this planting, the farmer I'd been renting my land to had planted "Roundup-Ready" corn. The thinking, this on the part of a DNR forester I was working with, was that this would be an ideal start for the trees, corn leaving behind a relatively clean field. Hehe, not quite what happened. I'm not saying that guy was wrong, but the Roundup-Ready stuff means there's zero carry-over effect from the herbicide. Every-and I do mean every-weed seed in that field germinated in that first wet year. I had 20 solid acres of ragweed, higher than my head. When I drove down my lane right around this time of year, the pollen coming out of all that ragweed looked like smoke. good thing I'm not especially prone to allergies! Never saw anything quite like it. So, what to do? I quickly realized there was simply no way I was going to be able to control those weeds, so in partial desperation, made up my mind to ignore it and see if it would go away! Well, in one year over year period, that entire field transitioned from annual junk weeds to 100% perennial forbs and grasses, mostly giant Canada goldenrod and asters. I wish I could somehow indicate how crazy this transfer has been, but I kid you not-all of the annual weed junk went away after just the first year. So why all this talk about weeds, and nothing about watering? Well, for one thing, attempting to water all those 6000 new trees was utterly impossible. No attempt was made. As I said, we got some luck from the skies that first year, it being very wet. So no need to water.....ever. The following year was decent for rainfall too, and after just three growing seasons in the ground, I've got pine and larch "seedlings" that are now over my head. One note about Gal's statement to use natives: I generally agree with this, but if you're an expert on forestry, there are some non-natives that can be used to good effect. To wit, some of my planting-this in northeastern Wisconsin-consists of Norway spruce, one of my all-time fave conifers, and hybrid larch, about which I will only say, they are almost miraculous in terms of their growth rate.. I did also plant lots of native white pine, red pine, white spruce, and some others, as well as lifted native Thuja occidentalis from areas in my woods where it was coming up thicker than what would have survived, to be moved up into the field. All of these lived and are growing rapidly. But those are details. what you want to do is study up on large-scale planting of seedlings/plug stock and make your plans from there. You're not alone-thousands have done exactly what you propose-so no need to reinvent the wheel. Do you have DNR foresters or equivalent to work with in your area? I already knew what I was going to do-I'm not exactly new to this sort of thing-but the help was still valuable. Get back to us if you have more questions. As I said, this is really near and dear to me. +oM